You don't have to be a Belgian detective with a funny moustache* to guess who's been buying most of the new machinery in the last four or five years. Yes, it's contractors and bigger farmers, plus those acquisitive types who who have taken on the farm next door.
Lack of profits have meant smaller arable farmers (and many mixed farms), on the other hand, have kept their cheque books on a leash that's tighter than a pet alligator's.
But a stroll around one of the two Tillage events yesterday suggested that the smaller farmer is back in the market. Several plough and cultivator makers said they had seen an upsurge in orders from growers wanting to ditch ageing equipment (some of it bought at about the same period that The Ark was new) in favour of something brand, spanking new.
The accountants will shake their heads, of course, and put up lots of baffling graphs about why we shouldn't be buying on impulse. But, with grain prices joyously high (sorry, livestock farmers), when else do you reinvest?
There's another trend happening too, if the machinery makers are to be believed. Farmers who were happy to turn over many of the cultivations and drilling jobs to contractors when wheat was £65 a tonne, are now planning to buy new kit and take the job back in-house again.
The accountants will mutter about the folly of that, too. But then (as we all know) buying new machinery is one of the greatest pleasures of being an arable farmer.
Scientific tests have shown that the pleasure and satisfaction experienced by a farmer spotting the lorry with the new tractor on top turning into his yard is akin to that felt by Sir Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay reaching the top of Everest or Mahler finally finishing his First Symphony.
* Hercule Poirot, of course